Cut Xbox One Load Times Down by Almost Half with External SSHD

Xbox One load times are sometimes a pain in the ass although we wouldn’t regard them as a major problem. However, if you don’t like waiting during your gaming sessions, using external SSHD with the console can reduce the load times by a great margin.

Although it was already known to some that this method can help improve load times, but Christopher Sardegna, a software developer ran some benchmarks using The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt to calculate the load times between fast travel points and came up with a more calculated difference that external SSHD can make to your Xbox One.

5200 RPM Hard Drive and SATA II that comes with the console is the primary reason behind it so he used the USB 3 ports on the back of the console. Check out the table below to see the results.

To ascertain the performance increases from the removal of the old storage bottleneck, I ran some benchmarks. I ran the tests 5 times and averaged the resulting times. All calculations were made in Excel. The average load time reduction is 42%, nearly cutting wait time in half. Loading between fast travel points that are much closer together is near instant.

In case you are looking to benefit from the workaround, it will cost you nearly $100 to use the same setup as Sardegna which includes “a 1TB Seagate Laptop SSHD that combines an 8GB SSD with a 7200RPM HDD for the storage and a generic USB 3.0 SATA III Docking Station.”

Let us know in the comments if you consider it a worthy investment for reducing the Xbox One load times.